With the development of new applications and technologies, such as digital television, on-line gaming and home automation, Internet access must extend to various types of home devices, for example a set-top box, a game console, a home automation system, several desktops and laptops, etc. All these home devices are interconnected by means of a home network, such as a Wi-Fi network. To guarantee a uniform customer experience, also referred to as QoE, across the whole home network, care must be taken to enhance Wi-Fi coverage in the home networks.
Access points are deployed in such home networks in a random fashion across different rooms, different floors, different apartment blocks, etc. This results in interferences, contention, problems with load balancing, etc., but poor coverage remains one of the most severe problems encountered in home networks. Obstacles such as walls, stretched layouts and suboptimal placement of the access points in the home networks all give rise to a number of coverage holes in home networks. In addition to coverage holes, some areas of the home network might be poor reception zones where the end user's device hardly receives a Wi-Fi signal from an access point. The end user then experiences a poor performance and his QoE deteriorates.
Dense Wi-Fi deployment is one of the ways to significantly enhance Wi-Fi coverage and to thereby increase the customer QoE. For example, additional access points, such as for example Wi-Fi extender and Wi-Fi repeaters, are deployed in a home network in order to guarantee a uniform customer experience. The type and the location of these additional access points is manually chosen. Each additional access point indeed comprises an indicator being activated as soon as the additional access point enters a Wi-Fi coverage zone.
Several limitations remain coupled with dense Wi-Fi deployment. First, there exists to continuous nor remote monitoring of the link between the access points, the Wi-Fi extenders or repeaters, and the end devices. It could be that the Wi-Fi coverage in a home network changes as new obstacles arise and/or as layouts of the home network stretch. Additionally, the detection thresholds of the additional access points are predefined and cannot be tuned. Each provider of access point predefines a set of thresholds which might not be compatible with a set of thresholds of another provider. The indications provided by their indicators are instantaneous measurements that are not reflective of an average Wi-Fi coverage in the home network. Additionally, there exists no correlation between the indications and an expected Wi-Fi coverage. Finally, if the indicator malfunctions, an end user will not be able to determine if the access point malfunctions or if the Wi-Fi coverage is too weak.
Another proposed solution to increase the customer QoE is described in the white paper of Qualcomm entitled “Qualcomm Hy-Fi Total Configuration Algorithm (TCA) for Hybrid Devices” published in January 2013. This solution relies on hybrid networks where the access points of a home network adjust their parameters such that the Wi-Fi coverage is optimized and such that the interferences between access points are minimized. This approach is complex and extremely costly.